


I Didn't Get My Education from Slash: Why Should You?

by Franzeska



Series: March Meta Matters [6]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:07:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23048536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Franzeska/pseuds/Franzeska
Summary: I Didn't Get My Education from Slash: Why Should You?And other musings on slash vs. gay representation
Series: March Meta Matters [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1664836
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	1. Hear, hear!

**Author's Note:**

> Uploaded for day 6 of the March Meta Matters Challenge
> 
> These are a variety of meta posts spanning 2017-2020. All deal with fandom demanding that slash be "good representation" or educational and my counterpoint that "queer media" may overlap with slash, but they are far from synonymous.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: January 16, 2017
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/155939409864/kaminoo-dont-see-why-i-should-pretend-not-to
> 
> I was responding to someone saying that the proponents of The Johnlock Conspiracy owed fans just as much of an apology as Moffit and Gatiss did.
> 
> This was in the era when much of non-TJLC Sherlock fandom was furious with [Graceebooks'](https://failfandomanon.fandom.com/wiki/Graceebooks) followers for illicitly recording a Sherlock fan discussing her sexual assault trauma in a con panel and posting it on the internet as part of their top/bottom shipwar. These were the fools who called people "pedophiles" for having the wrong middle-aged guy stick his dick in the wrong middle-aged ass while also writing extreme virginity "What's a boner?" type fic with the other one topping. The angry tag commentary in reblogs about "fandom mom" is referring to how graceebooks intentionally positioned herself at the time.
> 
> This particular little bite of meta isn't much, but it's clearly what led me to think about the post I made two days later.

Hear, hear!

I feel like there’s an element of learned helplessness here too: I sympathize with wanting your particular ship in your particular favorite live action media with a big budget. But when it’s clearly not going to happen, maybe it’s time to spend your hours and your money supporting something else.

Gay protagonists have been relatively common in mystery novels for decades. They’re not as common as main leads in TV mystery series, but they’re not unheard of. All manner of queer identities are common in comics, particularly webcomics. Queer film festivals may be full of films nobody has heard of, but they’re not all depressing films, and they’re not all realistic dramas. Plenty of that material can be found on Netflix or Fandor or by piracy, not to mention bought outright on iTunes, Amazon, et al. People have been making queer sff rec lists for decades as well, and the ease of finding books like that has only increased as ebooks have taken over.

I spent last summer reading essentially nothing but m/m sff crime procedural novels. I suffered through some real stinkers and a lot with relationship dynamics that didn’t hit my id right, but there were others that were fantastic and plenty that I think _somebody_ will love even if I didn’t. And that’s just the ones that were both of those genres at once, not pure mystery like Sherlock is.

The choice to keep following Sherlock in the hope of a type of representation its makers have repeatedly said they will not provide is just that: _a choice_.

Why is canon johnlock the hill everyone wants to die on instead of turning their attention to media that already contains representation–or even media that has surprise queer sex. I know Penny Dreadful turned into a hot mess in some ways, but you can’t deny it surprised people with Ethan in season one. Maybe people were embarrassingly stupid to not think every Spartacus character could potentially have a same sex relationship, but that’s another show where I remember the delicious tears of straight fanboys as their manly fave fucked a dude after being on the show a while. ~Surprise gay~ exists in media. Positive queer representation exists in media. Queer sff and mystery media exist.

Egging on suggestible fans with tinhat conspiracy theories is not revolutionary. Yelling at the BBC is not revolutionary. Directing your eyeballs and money to some other media might be.

#fandom meta #you have the power of choice so use it


	2. I Didn't Get My Education from Slash: Why Should You?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: January 18, 2017
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/156059579634/theres-a-meme-floating-around-in-fandom-that
> 
> I know I had Sherlock fandom bullshit on the brain, but I was clearly also pissed about the usual themes of the Fujocourse and the way Tumblr is always declaring it open season on female fans despite being full of us.
> 
> Given the content, I imagine someone had been questioning my cred as a bisexual woman, but I no longer remember the specific trigger for this post.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


There’s a meme floating around in fandom that hordes of impressionable “children” in their 20′s read nothing but slash fanfic and are, therefore, developing a warped view of what it means to be a gay man. Thus, goes the meme, it is the duty of those evil, exploitative “straight yaoi fangirls” to write very dull slice-of-life slash full of PSAs about condom use and a realistic treatment of sexual orientation. As a queer woman who did grow up reading fic from the age of 13, I have to ask:

**What kind of fuckhead gets their entire queer education from fanfiction?**

Queer media has existed forever. As a teen, in the 90′s, I avidly consumed the oeuvre of Pedro Almodóvar, freely available at my local video store. I remember when Velvet Goldmine came out and fandom just about wet itself in joy. It’s a movie largely focused on men, though as an adult, I definitely appreciate Toni Colette’s put-upon character. I have no idea how that character would identify by the later eras in the movie, but she loudly proclaims herself bi in the flashbacks.

Maurice set a precedent in the 80′s for being the first Merchant Ivory gay film. It’s a gorgeous (if kind of slow) costume drama with all the usual repression and longing of one of their films. I’ve been amused to see fandom rediscover it in recent years, probably by googling “Lestrad naked”. [A pause while all of you who haven’t done so run to google…]

Growing up in the Bay Area, I was surrounded by people who were massive fans of Armistead Maupin’s _Tales of the City_ series, including my straight mother. Those books chronicle entire eras of my hometown and all the many varied orientations and types of people found therein. But when I wanted something more exclusively female-centric, my local bookstore carried Alison Bechdel’s _Dykes to Watch Out For_ anthologies. I have to say, I always found Almodóvar’s nutso characters more personally relatable than Bechdel’s banally neurotic lead, but it was nice to have both. Around this same era, riot grrrls were producing all kinds of female-centric media, lots of it about queerness, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time.

Now, in the era I’m talking about, many people didn’t have the privilege of easy internet access or living near bookstores with gay sections or video stores that carry peculiar European art films. I’m talking about 20 years ago.

In the modern era, however, internet piracy is rampant, half the people I know subscribe to Netflix, and even people who can’t afford to leave a trail on the family computer can watch racy gay art films illegally uploaded to youtube–and that goes for people in many countries, not just mine. I have mentioned a _tiny_ sampling of the media I was personally aware of as a teenager and personally a fan of. There is an entire world out there to explore!

**There is no excuse for limiting your media consumption to slash fanfiction.**

If you _prefer_ slash to other media, great. You do you! But if, as I keep seeing, you are offended that slash fandom is largely women writing things that appeal to themselves and not constantly stopping to Think Of The Men, then you are in luck: the vast majority of queer media caters directly to queer men, especially gay men. The internet abounds with forums and recs lists aimed at gay men. There is no need to feel like an outsider in girl cootieville. Go where the men are if you prefer that!

Tumblr provides a skewed view of what’s out there, and that goes whether it’s mlm whining about “fujoshi” or people who ship het pairings honestly thinking they’re an oppressed minority.

If you want amateur, free m/m erotica that is most likely written by and for men (just as slash is most likely written by and for women), try Nifty.org. No, it won’t be sweet or nice or well-labeled. It’s trashy free erotica. Fandom doesn’t have a monopoly on that. And if you think Hydra Trash Party fans are the most sadistic or tasteless people on the internet, a day on Nifty should disabuse you of that notion. (Or, conversely, if you’re disappointed by HTP, Nifty is your new best friend!)

If you want writing with central queer characters that actually addresses homophobia in a non-fetishistic way and that is not just about romance or sex, look to a queer press. I don’t mean a publisher of ebook m/m romance novels: I mean a real, traditional, oldschool indie publisher of queer books that are _not genre romance_. Any recs list of mid-20th C. queer lit will net you plenty of books that are by queer people, for a queer audience, about queerness. Most of this stuff will be either gay or lesbian if it’s pre-90′s, but bisexual and trans* literature saw a big upswing then. It’s not exclusively written by people of the identities the books are about, but there’s a very strong correlation–vastly more so than you find in ebook romance novels.

There’s an entire world of queer media out there. So when I see men on the internet whining that slash fandom is not All About Me, I know that they are choosing to shit on a place women have made for ourselves instead of seeking something they would enjoy more. It’s not a legitimate complaint, even if the women they’re directly attacking are straight. It’s a sign of entitlement, male privilege, and an inability to lift a single fucking finger to help themselves.

**I ain’t your Mommy, and I don’t owe you the free labor of my fanfic writing.**

I don’t owe you a story in your fandom. I don’t owe you a story about your OTP. I don’t owe you a story with your favorite headcanon. I don’t owe you comments on your own fic–and, conversely, you don’t owe me comments on mine.

I used to be an economic moderate, but the last ten years have made me keenly aware of how much free labor women are expected to do. Well, enough! That kind of entitlement is the worst kind of capitalist exploitation coupled with a steaming dose of misogyny. To top it all off, it won’t work. Yelling at women that they don’t belong in their hobbies won’t make more men join those hobbies. Yelling that you feel alone because slash fandom isn’t about queer identity categories won’t make that any less true.

**As a queer person, you do yourself a disservice if you only read slash. Slash and queer media that is intended as queer media have different aims. I have found both valuable in different ways at different times in my life.**

#fandom meta #queer media #recs #misogyny #slash fandom


	3. You’ve missed the point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: October 20, 2018
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/179257184919/honestly-all-discussion-of-strikethrough-and-ao3
> 
> This was part of a conversation about why AO3 supporters are so against any censorship at all. Various posters pointed out that queer content is always the first attacked and that "no pedo" rules will be applied first and hardest to all of the g-rated fluff about queer teenagers.
> 
> As usual, a teenager was horrified that we would ~conflate~ gayness and pedophilia. Reading comprehension is dead, but what else is new.
> 
> I suppose this is only tenuously related to the previous chapter, but I've got the tumblr tab open and want to check it off of my list. The connection is that these are both about what it's like to be an older queer person with a grasp of history and how frustrating it is to talk to militant teenagers who lack that and who are proud of their ignorance.

> [...] y'all know comparing child porn to fanfics with gay people in them is real gross, right? Like there is a long history of gay people being compared to pedophiles to excuse homophobia and equating those things in fiction is extremely homophobic. Just like you can’t use pedophilia to condemn gay people, you can’t use gay people to excuse pedophilia! They are very different things and using them together in discussions like this is setting a potentially harmful precedent. [...]

Yes, it is real gross. Everyone in this conversation agrees. You’ve missed the point.

_Homophobes_ conflate them. _Homophobes_ like to twist rules to attack gay content. Rules against anything–from underage to explicit ratings–have been twisted like this before. It happened on LJ. It happened with zines.

The first thing that happens with a “no underage” rule is that some idiot tries to get rid of all of the Harry/Draco where they’re both 17–i.e. underage in the US but not the UK, well over puberty, and perfectly legal even in places they’d be underage. Nothing about such stories is “pedophilia” or “child porn”, but they’re first on the chopping block anyway.

During [Strikethrough](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough_and_Boldthrough), a homophobic activist group got a lot of communities deleted, from Harry Potter roleplays to literary discussions of Lolita to survivor support groups. 

AO3′s rules are designed to make it as easy as possible to avoid content you don’t like while also preventing witchhunts. Banning “immoral” fanfic puts a powerful weapon into the hands of homophobes.

(There’s no evidence that reading or writing underage fanfic is linked to actual pedophilia any more than most people who abuse children are actually pedophiles, BTW. That’s like thinking that rape fantasies and real life assault are linked or that video games turn people into murderers.)

A big chunk of what’s on AO3 right now is just fic about high school students having sex. I promise you that a ban on “underage” fic will lead to mass grudge-reporting of a few ships antis hate and of anything that’s a sensitive portrayal of gay teenagers figuring out their sexuality. Meanwhile, a bunch of super squicky straight stuff that doesn’t happen to be one half of a shipwar will get left alone.

Why do I think so? Because that’s what _always_ happens.

Until we fix homophobia itself, this will keep right on happening. We’re not saying that “pedophilia” and gayness are linked. We’re saying that the only way to protect gay fic is to have as little content policing as possible.

_We speak from experience._


	4. queer lit, pulps, BL, m/m romance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: November 15, 2018
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/180163669174/cactusreadingforeignthings-golbatgender
> 
> The fujocourse continued through the fall, as usual. Rottenboysclub posted about a bemusing set of tag commentary:
> 
> "#i gave up after r*trnb*ysclub entered#fuck nast straighties who fetishize mlm#its not even queer history ITS WRITTEN BY A STRAIGHT COS#FUCK"
> 
> For those of you not familiar with him, rottenboysclub was one of the few gay men posting real information about BL, terms like 'fujoshi', and Japanese fan culture. Unlike most tumblr _activistes_, he speaks Japanese and doesn't treat misogyny as a fun hobby.
> 
> (Not too long after this, he departed for Discord and moderated spaces full of people who can bother to google what 'fujoshi' actually means.)
> 
> He commented that there isn't any real terminology for queer lit by straight people vs. queer lit by queer people (as a response to "HDU call BL queer lit"). This was my respone:

I remember shopping for queer books in the 90s, and everything was together: fiction, nonfiction, serious(ly depressing) books about coming out, trashy pirate AUs of The Professionals with the names changed. It was sold in the same bookstores and came from the same presses.

The difference now is that m/m romance novels in English are a big category, like BL manga, when before you’d see the occasional romance novel coming from presses that mainly published other sorts of queer books. “M/M” as a marketing category is interesting: it contains a lot of series romance in the mainstream romance publisher sense where each book features a different couple, but they’re all linked by the characters knowing each other. However, it also contains a lot of what I’d call series urban fantasy or series mystery that happens to have a gay protagonist in a long-term relationship. (All of which makes perfect sense if you look at slash or BL, but it’s rather different from queer lit of the past.)

But I suppose it isn’t ultimately all that different from lesbian and gay pulps of the 1950s. Some of those authors were themselves queer. Lots, of whatever orientation, were dashing off trash for the paycheck and would have been shocked and amused to see their books become collectibles. (Kitschy collectibles, but still.)

#because I too had to know where the delightful tingler sendup came from #fandom meta


	5. misery porn for straights

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: October 16, 2019.
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/188398121249/a-new-history-of-fandom-purges
> 
> While I was at GRL (the industry conference for writers of m/m romance novels), wank blew up over my A New History of Fandom Purges. Frustratingly, a lot of it was in Chinese, so I couldn't follow it easily on my phone.
> 
> Tumblr made it hard to find half of the discussions on that post, which is why I haven't already included this in that other work on AO3.
> 
> One of the Chinese commenters was furious at me lumping Anne Rice's nonsense together with the things that are happening to Chinese women. At first I thought "Okay, maybe that wasn't very sensitive", but as she went on, it became clearer and clearer that she was offended at the idea that there's an overlap between fans of danmei media and fans who write m/m fanfic of nominally straight media. (Whut?)
> 
> She was on her hobby horse about how Bad Fans produce trash and not _important_ queer media like... Brokeback Mountain.
> 
> ...
> 
> AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I finally got back to my desktop and the ability to puzzle over google translate. Heh.

Honestly, what I’d say about (ughhhhhh) _Brokeback Mountain_ is that it was sneered at by queer people in the US when it came out. Lots of us called it “**misery porn for straights**”.

People felt that it was at least a decade or two behind the times and that we’d graduated from stories about martyrs intended to make our oppressors see us as tragic victims rather than frightening predators. We wanted all the regular dramas straight people get, like romcoms and sff with a happy ending.

There isn’t one correct answer here, especially when you look at different geographical areas where the danger of murder, violence, and incarceration are different, but anybody calling Brokeback definitively Real Gay Media™ makes me giggle.

Danmei are similar to the situation with “m/m romance”. (Again, the sheer irony that I’m writing all this from GRL, the industry conference for those books!) While a few gay men find them offensive and lots of gay men find them boring/weird/not for them, others talk about how vital it is to have stories with _happy endings_.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion in queer media circles about how fluffy, escapist fiction is a powerful activist tool, not for depicting anything overly political in and of itself, but for helping actual queer people not lose hope.

**I am so fucking tired of social issue literature! Give me literally any LGBT thing that is NOT THAT.**

And I know I’m not the only Legit For Real Queer Person™ who holds that view. Just food for thought.


	6. I, as a bi woman, relate most to bisexual characters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted January 17, 2020
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/190314318364/i-dont-think-its-necessarily-strictly-to-do-with  
https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/190317727404/i-dont-think-its-necessarily-strictly-to-do-with
> 
> This was a discussion about how the fujocourse assumes you can't identify across identity labels. I brought up that I may well _not_ be doing that, from my perspective, when I make or consume m/m content.

Yes!

I think bisexuality gets erased from these conversations a lot in the sense that I, as a bi woman, relate most to bisexual characters, but I really don’t care about gender nearly as much.

To say that I’m “stealing” from “gay men” (as a lot of tumblr does) is telling me that gender is _more important_ than orientation when it comes to how you identify and that this is required to be true for all humans. It’s also saying that bi men are the same as gay men and that gay men should speak for both.

(Not that bi men couldn’t object to bi women speaking for them, but this isn’t actually the argument I see put forward on tumblr very often. Bisexual spaces offline tend to be fairly mixed gender and mostly interested in proving that bisexual men _actually exist_. Ladies being thirsty for bi dudes is not usually something people are upset about because it’s comparatively rare.)

Once we move into the fanfic space, there’s the added dimension that many, many, many of the popular characters for fic are presumed straight in canon. Is a straight woman writing m/m about Captain America “stealing” from gay men or straight ones? (I mean, “stealing” is a stupid way to look at it in the first place, but even so: this is not actually a queer icon that’s being reworked in a fanfic.)

The actual “problem” with fujoshi-targeted media has nothing to do with BL itself. The _actual_ problem is a lack of queer media or a lack of queer media the speaker _likes_ and can _find_.

I am (somewhat) sympathetic to guys who want to hang out exclusively on Tumblr and who like tropey media similar to what is found in BL, danmei, slash fanfic, m/m romance novels, etc. If you want that flavor of media but exclusively by and for men, you’re going to have a hard time.

OTOH, while queer media is sadly rare as a percentage of all media, quite a bit does exist, and a hell of a lot of it is by and for men. I wish more of tumblr would go explore what media does exist.

I don’t think most of tumblr is going to _like_ that media–it’s too depressing or too purely about sex or uses completely different tropes–but I wish people would explore nonetheless. It would give them more perspective the next time they’re angry that fujoshi are the ones who make the media they like.

Satan's tiddies responded with a long, thoughtful comment about queer men and BL fandom, including:

> They tell me, “we shouldn’t be celebrating M/M romances written by women, they should have been written by MLM”, and I reply, “what’s stopping us from writing them? It’s certainly not female slash fans!”.
> 
> (It’s probably gender expectations and toxic masculinity that’s stopping us from writing the fluffy/romantic/tropey stories that we clearly crave, but I hope that will change in the near future.)

One hopes! One hopes!

But to be honest, I think a big part of this “problem” is just people existing in a tumblr bubble.

I went to GRL this year. That’s the industry conference for m/m romance novels. It was indeed mostly women, as you’d expect, but it was certainly not all women. There was a contingent of guys there. A really prominent author came out as a trans man during the conference. Cis or trans, there are men already making that media. They’re often not the ones trumpeting being “The Only Real Man” or whatever, like Josh Lanyon used to. (Lanyon is a cis woman. What a jerk.)

There are also all those men making other types of m/m media because… well… that’s what they prefer. I’m sure some of it is about gender expectations people should strive to unlearn, but perhaps BL-ish tastes would be the minority taste anyway? Particularly among cis dudes embedded in a particular kind of cis dude culture? Impossible to say for sure.

I always wonder how much of tumblr has seen, say, Velvet Goldmine. That movie is mega fangirl bait, but it’s also a gay coming of age story by a gay director. (And yes, some of the guys in it appear to be bi or conflicted or whatever, but the fanboy character is clearly Haynes self insert having a sexual awakening listening to David Bowie records. Seriously, I have never seen a more Gay Fanboy piece of media. It’s awesome.)

It’s just one movie. It’s not going to be enough media to keep one entertained forever. But I can’t shake the feeling that a lot of people on here are missing out on the stuff that is 100% known to be by queer men and that is closer to tumblr-y tastes.


	7. We want fujoshi media, not cis gay men's media

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: January 21, 2020.
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/190396303529/i-think-a-more-constructive-conversation-to-have
> 
> An anonymous ask commented that we should complain about the big fish who actually decide against queer media, not the individual creators who are at the mercy of the studios. Fiction is not reality weighed in about indie creators vs. big media. I had a different take related to the other chapters in this AO3 work.

I think we also need to be clear on what we’re asking for.

What fandom wants is for the media that _fandom_ finds shippy to have central, canon m/m or f/f. We want genre fiction, whether that’s sff, horror, or crime, with the same iddy tropes found in fanfic and in certain het media, especially het media aimed at a female or mixed audience.

We _don’t_ actually want most of the media that most cis gay guys make for themselves. There are _some_ cis gay guys who like the same sorts of romance novels and epic equal-and-complementary partners that tumblr likes. Many cis gay guys are more interested in the gay version of that thing where the cool action hero wins the plot and is rewarded with a prize or in art with less romance.

We _don’t_ actually want most realistic dramas about coming out or about gaybashing or about AIDS. That media already exists. If we liked it, we’d be consuming it. Some of us like romcoms with no sff/crime elements, and those are rare. Serious drama about what it means to be gay/trans/whatever that is not shippy and tropey is not usually what we are looking for. Again: this media exists. If we are not already consuming it, there’s a reason.

Not only do the higher ups in media not want to make things queer: they are often confused by the very stereotyped-female, fujoshi-ish tastes that fandom has. They often _do not see the shippiness_. They are certainly homophobic, but it goes much deeper than that.

“Please make more gay shows” gets us Instinct on CBS. I liked season 1 well enough. A few people on tumblr posted about it. But the central gay character is much like central straight characters on that type of CBS show: a lot of his interesting emotional energy is with his work partner, and he and his spouse have a relationship that veers into Cool Guy/Whiny Nag At Home when it’s not busy being really bland and boring. It’s the absolute opposite of Buddy Cops Who Also Fuck or Cool Rivals Who Get Together.

The chemistry he had in the pilot with his former spy associate who is desperately trying to get him back into the game was way more fandom’s speed. Their shippiness pretty much disappeared after that, so I ended up shipping dodgy spy guy/female buddy cop waaaaaaay more than the canon m/m. I was not alone.

Props to CBS for trying this. I truly mean that! But even with trying to improve the husband and give him more to do, this was never going to be fandom’s new darling. It’s simply the wrong flavor of ship playing with the wrong tropes.

The solution is to _admit_ that what we are really talking about is a live action, Western equivalent of BL/danmei. We already have this sort of content in every media format from Asia. We already have it in romance novels in the West. Not just the indie ones anymore! Fucking Harlequin publishes some tropey m/m now! We have audiobooks though not audio dramas. We have the occasional Western indie comic. F/F is doing a little better on the pro media front here, no matter how much smaller its fic numbers.

The big piece we’re missing is BL-ish live action from the West.

But if we try to _pretend_ that it’s _not_ fujoshi media, we cut out like 90% of the paying audience that could make this media viable. And then everyone, of every gender, loses.

Tumblr is highly invested in this pretense.


End file.
